Guy Stephens

Capgemini

Guy is a Social Media/Social Customer Care Consultant at Capgemini. He has worked in the digital space for over 14 years. He sits on the Founding Council for BestServiceOne.com, is a frequent conference speaker, blogger, founder of two LinkedIn Groups - 'where social media meets customer service' and 'Social Media Governance Forum'. He has been described by Dr Dave Chaffey as one of the 'world's leading thinkers' on the subject. He was previously the Customer Knowledge Manager at The Carphone Warehouse, where he set up the use of social customer care.

Social customer care: Do customers know?

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Posted on 2012-05-15

I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about digital literacy as it pertains to organisations. Howard Rheingold talks about five literacies – attention, collaboration, participation, network savvy, critical consumption.

I’ve written a number of posts asking the question whether organisations understand these emerging literacies or if they simply assume them. To this end, organisational readiness is becoming increasingly important.

But I began to wonder over the weekend whether customers know what they’re doing when it comes to social? And following on from this, do customers even need to know what they’re doing? Or is the equivalent ‘customer literacy’ simply one of experimentation?

Customers do what they do when they want to do it: experiment, channel-hop, change their minds - these are part of their lexicon. But organisations, for the most part, are not built with this in mind. Organisations are built on averages, constancy, likelihoods… I am reminded of...

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Social customer care: Life’s a journey into the unknown

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Posted on 2012-05-11

I was having a – Friday afternoon thought – a moment ago about social media and a career.

I’m not one of those people who went to university knowing what they wanted to do. I ended up reading anthropology, linguistics, Chinese philosophy, before eventually majoring in Chinese. A few years later I ended up living in Taiwan for about three years, or was it five? During this time I taught English, I worked as a translator at the National Palace Museum. After this I ended up in the UK where I went back to university and got my Masters from the University of Oxford reading Sinology (Chinese). My thesis looked at the popularisation of culture during the Ming Dynasty. For this I wrote about a work by Tu Long called ‘Kao Pan Yu Shi’ (‘Desultory Remarks on Furnishing the Abode of a Retired Scholar’) first published in 1606. This compendium was somewhat akin to the gentlemen guides of the 19th century. After this I got...

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Social customer care: You are not important!

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Posted on 2012-05-10

I was wondering a moment ago just how important businesses are to their customers.

Over the last few years social media has been catalytic in disrupting ‘business as usual’. Channels of communication are democratising, the workplace is blurring, customer service is decentralising, information is traded for free, it is hard to recognise who is your customer and who is your employee, technology is increasingly ubiquitous, smartphones and tablets give us the possibility to be always on, always connected, always in touch…

We live in a world where there are no templates to copy. Each of us is writing our own playbook as we experience it.

We question, we share, we provoke, we cajole, we challenge, we undermine, we disrupt, we interrupt, we experiment, we play, we explore. We click on one link and then another and another and another, each one takes us further away from where we started. Curiosity can get us into trouble online. It can also show us new things. It can...

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Social customer care: Random thoughts on being ungrateful on a Friday night

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Posted on 2012-05-04

I flew #RoyalBruneiAir a couple of months ago. I Tweeted a week or so before I left asking what their service was like. @RoyalBruneiAir responded and wished me a good journey.

As I was waiting to board the plane, my name was called out and I was asked to come to the front desk. I was upgraded to business class.

It was a fantastic experience and I can only put it down to the fact that I Tweeted them beforehand. My Klout score was below 50, so I didn’t think that was a factor. It was the first time I have truly slept on a plane, once I had figured out how to get my seat horizontal. I even had a duvet, yes a duvet.

I had a really interesting conversation with a colleague a couple of days ago about social media and the utilities sector.

Themes we talked about: Decentralisation of service, culture not technology, changing business models, business...

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Social customer care and ‘digital literacy’

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Posted on 2012-03-06

I’ve been watching a number of YouTube videos recently featuring Howard Rheingold talking about ‘digital literacy’.

Howard Rheingold Digital Literacies

People of the Screen, Rick Prelinger and Howard Rheingold at IFTF

In the video above, he asks the question: What is it that we assume that people know in this day of everyone carrying a laptop, a phone that’s connected to the net?

He goes on to say: But they really don’t in terms of a literacy. By literacy I mean, a skill plus...

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Social customer care: Do you ‘get’ your customer?

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Posted on 2012-02-08

We spend so much time thinking about call deflection, setting up Live Chat, ROI of Twitter customer service, delighting the customer…

But I’m wondering how much time we think about what the future of customer service could look like? We are living in a period of huge change, where every day we are challenged by things that are new, different, faster, more convenient. Offerings such as - Ushahidi, Zeebox, Google Hangouts, Layar, Facebook verbs, Storify, My6Sense - offer us tantalising glimpses into what that...

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Social customer care: Hypotheses, notions of failure and freedom

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Posted on 2012-01-20
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ‘trial and error’. I’ve also been reading Henry Petroski’s book ‘To Engineer is Human: The role of failure in successful design‘. I’ve also been thinking about this in the context of social customer care and how so many companies who are looking to go down this route are looking for answers to some of the following questions:
- What’s the ROI?
- How do I scale it?
- What skillsets do my agents need?
- Who owns it?
- Where should I start: Twitter, Facebook or communities?
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In his book, Petroski gives many examples of engineering failures, where bridges have twisted or buildings collapsed. But what intrigued me, and continues to do so, was the fact that none of these ‘failures’...
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Social customer care becomes a verb

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Posted on 2011-12-05

I met up with Joshua March earlier today of Conversocial, who are doing some excellent things in the social media customer service space at the moment. Conversocial’s platform sets out to ‘manage customer service at scale in Facebook and Twitter’. They have identified a niche and are building up a solid and robust proposition. Meeting with Joshua today reminded me that I’ve not blogged for a few weeks, and that I had a number of half-written posts which I needed to finish. So keeping with the Facebook theme…

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Over the last eight to twelve months or so the use of Facebook as a customer service platform has gained increasing popularity amongst organisations willing to expand their social customer care repertoire beyond Twitter.

There is no doubt that Facebook is becoming more and more embedded into the social landscape that many of...

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Social customer care: Service without email

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Posted on 2011-11-07

I was watching this video a moment ago – Productivity Future Vision (2011) – and it made me think about the way we make decisions.

I am used to making decisions and asking for decisions via email. Once I send an email, I do not necessarily expect an immediate answer. A sense of ‘delay’ has been built into email’s DNA. Yet email by its very nature is not really about decision-making. Email is about considering and thinking about the decision that needs to be made. It is about conveying the information, or at least a version of the information, that is required in making a decision at some future point. It is about...

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Social customer care: Four quotes and a global conversation

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Posted on 2011-11-04

In 1999, the Cluetrain Manifesto was written by Rick Levine, Doc Searls, Christopher Locke and David Wienberger. The authors put forward the idea of the ‘global conversation’:

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter – and getting smarter faster than most companies.”

In 2007, Wikinomics was written by Dan Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. The authors write about the idea of the ‘shared canvas’:

“The new Web is…a shared canvas where every splash of paint contributed by one user provides a richer tapestry for the next user to modify or build on. Whether people are creating, sharing, or socializing, the new Web is principally about...

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